Our Mission In Space

U.S. Space Command, working with allies and partners, plans, executes and integrates military space power into multidomain global operations in order to deter aggression, defend national interests, and when necessary, defeat threats.

It’s been almost a decade since nations started formally declaring space a warfighting domain, beginning with the United States in 2018. Now, the world is starting to see just what that prospect looks like.

Interference with navigation satellites, cat-and-mouse maneuvers on orbit and a push to develop space weapons are a reality today. This issue of Apogee explores space as a rapidly evolving warfighting domain — not yet a battlefield but a place where nations are jockeying for position as a deterrent, to achieve superiority, or both.

One key weapon in the fight is maneuverability — knowing the capabilities of your adversary as you develop your own. This requires a level of space situational awareness (SSA) that defense leaders are working to advance by speeding the timeliness of observations and analysis they get from their own assets and from
those of their commercial partners.

The challenge comes into focus on the operations floor of one SSA company Apogee visited, COMSPOC, which tracks mysterious movements by spacecraft from the Chinese Communist Party and Russia in what a U.S. Space Force leader has likened to orbital dogfighting. Warns COMSPOC’s CEO: “Threats in space are
already ahead of our space domain awareness.”

Cyber operations are key to modern counterspace arsenals, alongside jamming, directed energy and anti-satellite missiles. They’re incorporated into sprawling digital ecosystems that involve global ground stations, cloud service providers and commercial-military hybrids with intertwining data streams. Every link in this chain represents a potential vulnerability. As one researcher told us, “Cyber is an entry point for a threat vector that cuts across every physical domain, including space.”

The number of nations deploying counterthreat assets in space remains relatively small, but it’s growing rapidly in number and sophistication. The Secure World Foundation singled out Australia, France and India as leaders in the field, each pursuing new capabilities in its own way. Australia, for example, is building only nondestructive assets, one analyst told Apogee: “The goal is to strengthen deterrence by denial and deterrence through resilience.”

Connecting the latest commercial innovation with national security priorities is a tall order in a marketplace that arose under narrow legacy systems. The U.S. Space Force Front Door program aims to streamline the process, ensuring that all those with good ideas can make their way through — even if they don’t have
connections already and risk seeing their emails “die on the vine,” the program director told us. “When it comes through the Front Door process, we’re expanding visibility into those capabilities tenfold.”

You’ll also find reports in this issue that feature warfighting in space: how the versions Hollywood has been producing for decades stand up next to the real-world conflict emerging today, an exploration of both the orbit-hopping U.S. spaceplane under development since 1999 and the mysterious version Beijing has fielded in more recent years, and the progress being made in U.S. Space Force efforts to get national security payloads into orbit on demand.

Regards,

APOGEE STAFF

> A Rapidly Evolving Warfighting Domain Volume 3 Issue 1 2026

Apogee is a professional military magazine published by United States Space Command (USSPACECOM) for foreign partners and allies including senior military leaders, government officials and academic professionals. The goal of the publication and website is to strengthen U.S. security partnerships in space and provide an international forum to address global space defense challenges.

The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the policies or points of view of USSPACECOM or the United States government. The Secretary of Defense has determined that publication of this magazine is necessary for conducting public business as required by the Department of Defense by law.